813 20th-Century France; Finest Hotel in Kabul; Photogenic Scotland

0:01Lise Doucette has been reporting from trouble spots around the world since the 1980s. Coming up, the BBC's chief international correspondent tells us how one hotel in Kabul helped her get to know the people of Afghanistan and learn how much they've gone through. In a country where so much has been lost, their deeply ingrained sense of hospitality still remains. Next time you're in Paris, historian Cullen Jones suggests she'll look at how its monuments form a straight line from the Louvre all the way to La Défense. It's like a sort of skewer through French history with enormously rich, juicy morsels of French history all the way strung along it.

0:40And a nature photographer from the Outer Hebrides shares tips for capturing the impressive scenery you'll find in Scotland. You get these incredible shades of light that come from the heavens as if it's just pinpointing. Little things for you to look at, we call them the silver jewels of the earth. Come along. It's Travel with Rick Steves.

1:01It promised to bring modern sophistication to Afghanistan, when the Intercontinental opened as the first luxury hotel in Kabul back in 1969. And somehow, it's still standing today. As BBC journalist Lise Doucette points out, the stories of the hotel and its staff provide a kind of people's history that reveals much about the character of the people of Afghanistan. Coming up today on Travel with Rick Steves, Lise Doucette tells us how the Intercontinental served as a refuge, not only for foreign correspondents reporting on Afghanistan's wars, but also for the Afghanis she got to know who've worked there.

1:38And later in the hour, a Scottish photographer offers pointers for where you should aim your camera to bring back a souvenir of the wild majesty of Scotland. Let's start today's travel with Rick Steves with a closer look at France and the roles it played for most of the 20th century as one of the world's major powers. Keep in mind, France has a history that encompasses some 2 ,000 years all the way back to Roman Gaul. To help us better understand what we're seeing in the world's most visited country, Let's check in now with historian Colin Jones. He's written a number of works on French history, which he distills in his latest book.

2:12It's called The Shortest History of France. Bonjour, Colin. Thank you, Rick. Nice to be here. Yeah, you know, I was thinking about how our sightseeing can help us give us a rack upon which to hang an understanding of 20th-century France, but it's got to start in the 19th century in, what, 18... What year was the Eiffel Tower constructed? Well, it was, I can tell you, in two ways. First, it was 1889, and secondly, it was the centenary of the French Revolution of 1789, quite deliberately so, that it was a republic celebrating itself as a republic, but celebrating itself also as a world power. And in that year, they had a world fair, essentially, like Chicago in 1893.

2:53They beat Chicago to it. And it was basically a place where the world came together. There were individual pavilions. It was a tremendous sort of cosmopolitan success. and one of the things which they wanted to do to show the world was the strength and the power and the capacity of French engineering genius and they got Mr. Eiffel to put together the idea of an enormous tower which probably would be taken down, possibly at the end of the exhibition, possibly it would last for 30 or 40 years and here we are with what is obviously the icon of Parisian identity still with us, very much so. So this is so interesting.

3:32on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. That would be 1889, right? Yeah. They built this type of a big celebration. And just to kind of underline how modern it was, it was like this giant erector set, and they could order up all the parts. They knew exactly what they needed. They assembled it on a strict schedule, and they could disassemble it on the same strict schedule. But they decided to leave it up, thank goodness. But in so many ways, it was the symbolic kicking off of the modern age, wasn't it? Absolutely. And I think the fact that France was announcing itself as back in power, if you like, it had lost the war against the Germans in 1870, 71, had had a big economic and social and political crisis.

4:13But now it was back and it was back as a world power, a global power. It really emphasized the colonies and, you know, seemed to be one of the global powers of the late 19th and into the 20th century. And now this is when France comes, I think, into the fore as a modern cultural kind of power. It's always been a political and a cultural power, but now this is modernity. And we get this delightful time until World War I, of course, where it was sort of the garden party of Europe. And speaking of garden parties, you had Monet and the Impressionists, and you could go to Givernais and see those water lilies and those weeping willow trees.

4:53You've got this concept of vacations and workers' rights and avant-garde. Tell us about France just culturally at the dawn of the 20th century. I think France at the dawn of the 20th century, it is seen as probably the most attractive cultural site in the whole of the world. I mean, the fact that tourists absolutely line up down the road to come there in huge numbers, It's really the moment that France, Paris, in particular the whole of France, becomes the tourist destination number one for the world. And it's backed up, you know, in great literature, in great art. What is so interesting is that, you know, the French capital, and the French capital is really important in all aspects of culture as well as politics, has always been the place where, you know, the biggest art schools are, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and things like that.

5:44But what happens, particularly with the Impressionists, is that it becomes the site, if you like, of their paintings. So we all think of Paris in the 19th century through Monet or through Pissarro or something like that. So then it moves into Cubism again. France is absolutely in the avant-garde. Indeed, the very idea of the avant-garde is something in literature and in culture and in a way in politics as well that is very much associated with France. That is so interesting, Colin, that my image of France is with dappled light. And dappled light is all about the way an Impressionist would paint a street scene in Paris.

6:20And you mentioned all the tourists were coming in, but also all of the artists, the musicians, the writers. It was just the place to go. It's no wonder Picasso left Spain and decided to live in Paris, the cultural center of it all. And then we have the rude awakening of what was called the Great War. They didn't know there was going to be another one, so it wasn't World War I yet. But tell us about the impact of World War I and World War II on France, because we have a tough time imagining the cost of a battle of attrition where two societies, France and Germany, decide that we're going to just bash our heads against each other and we calculate that the other guy's going to bleed white and drop first.

7:03And they kept on bashing and bashing and bashing, didn't they? Absolutely. I mean, the trench warfare that established itself just a few months actually after the beginning of the war, and people hadn't really expected that in quite the same way. They thought probably it would be a war, a rapid war of movement, but it settled down because of basically the strength of firepower into these trenches led by generals who were completely out of their depth and felt that they could, with some sort of justification, send vast numbers of men over the top to their certain deaths in many, many cases. the loss of population by France and Germany was just, we're talking millions and millions, and of all the countries who took part in the Great War, France was proportionally the most affected.

7:48And that had a really big impact in all sorts of ways on what happened next because, first of all, France wanted to take it out on Germany, and particularly because France was very economically weakened by the war, but it continued that enmity against Germany, which obviously you get the payback with the rise of Hitler. But it also meant that, you know, the population was really lacking and it was vast numbers of war wounded and all the rest of it. The presence of the war lasts a long time. Honestly, if your viewers go around, they'll find in the smallest village, they'll find a war memorial. On that will be a list of the names of the people who died in the Great War.

8:26It is stunning. You know, those war memorials are really, really emotional. and every time I'm in a small town in France, I have to pause at the war memorials. And sadly, the war memorials are built with empty plaques for names for future wars on them, and there continue to be names to put on those plaques, you know, but nothing was like the devastation of World War I. Cullen Jones is joining us from New York right now on Travel with Rick Steves, where he's working on a John and Constance Berkland Fellowship at the Kuhlman Center with the New York Public Library. He's helping us sightsee 20th-century French history.

9:04Cullen's the author of The Shortest History of France. His earlier books include The Cambridge Illustrated History of France, Paris, Biography of a City, and The Smile Revolution in 18th-Century Paris. You'll find more about Cullen and his work in this week's show notes at ricksteves.com slash radio. Anytime you get a chance to get your brain around a country's complicated history before traveling there, it makes your sightseeing so much more rewarding. And here's an example of that, Cullen, and I'd like to finish our conversation just with this thought. When I'm on the top floor of the Louvre Museum, formerly the biggest palace in Europe, and now it's the biggest collection of paintings, I believe, in Europe, I can look out and I see the horseshoe-shaped palace of the divine monarch, Louis.

9:50I don't know which was the big, huge palace for one of the Louis, before they went to Versailles. and then you see the Champs -Élysées, the Grand Boulevard, and it reaches a bluff where you've got the Arc de Triomphe. And then beyond the Arc de Triomphe, you actually see a bigger arch, which is the Arch of the Defense, way outside of the center of town. It's all one long axis. And the Parisians see this as kind of a planned and symbolic axis. What does that Grand Axis mean to you from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe to the La Défense. Yes, it's like a sort of skewer through French history with enormously rich, juicy morsels of French history all the way strung along it, really, from the Louvre, which, as you say, was the royal palace for when the kings of France were in residence in Paris, which wasn't always the case, from the late Middle Ages onwards.

10:45What I'd also say is you mentioned some of the sites, but actually the fact that what's not there is important because in front of the Louvre until the 19th century was a lot of like tenement buildings really. The poor lived really close to the kings at that time. That was wiped away in the 19th century. And also another palace, the Tuileries Palace, which was the victim of the Paris Commune in 1871. So that opened up that space through Champs -Élysées via the Place de la Concorde, as you say, and the obelisks there. then through this Champs -Élysées, right up to the Arc de Triomphe, which was put there in celebration of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, but in the sort of 1830s, 1840s, right through to the great commercial centre of La Défense, and in the heart of that, and very much on the axis again, another lump on the skewer, if you like, the great arch of La Défense, which celebrates the commercial and economic sense and value of the French.

11:49So it's kind of like you got the divine monarch, the royal, at the Palace of the Louvre. Then you go through the Place de la Concorde where the guillotine was set up and that's where they cut off the head of the king. Absolutely, yeah. And then what used to be the king's carriageway is now the people's way, the Champs -Élysées, leading up to the Arc de Triomphe, this grand Napoleonic celebration of French nationalism and the people. And then beyond that, you've got a celebration of international trade and the global economy, the Place de la Défense. It's so much fun to bring meaning to your travels by just understanding the context.

12:30And Colin, what you've really illustrated quite well in your book is you don't need to be a huge scholar as a traveler to get joy out of the history and the art. You just need to get your hands on some information and get the context, and then I think your travels become much more rewarding. Cullen, thank you so much for joining us and inspiring us to do exactly that as we look forward to our next trips. Thank you very much. It's been a lot of fun. Mais ça semble notre pays, mais oui. Cullen Jones looks at how the European Union has helped to overcome a century of adversity between France and Germany.

13:08It's in an extra with this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll look at photographing the rugged beauty of Scotland in just a bit. But first, the BBC's chief foreign correspondent tells us how reporting from the finest hotel in Kabul has helped her understand Afghanistan since the 1980s. That's next on Travel with Rick Steves. On Christmas Day in 1988, just weeks before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, journalist Lise Doucette checked in to Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel for the first time. She was struck by the hotel's faded grandeur, once a gleaming symbol of sophistication when it opened in 1969, and by the hospitality of the staff who kept it running amid the turmoil.

13:54Since then, Lise has become one of the world's most respected journalists, and as the BBC's chief international correspondent, she's covered conflicts from the Arab Spring to the war in Ukraine. Throughout her career, she's returned many times to Afghanistan and to the Intercontinental Hotel, watching the country and the hotel endure wave after wave of violence and chaos, and yet somehow the Intercontinental Hotel never closed its doors. Her new book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, tells the story of the real people who kept those doors open in a sweeping yet deeply intimate portrait of a battered country.

14:31Lise, welcome and thanks for joining us. It's really an honor to be on your travel program, Rick. Well, Lisa, I went through Afghanistan as a backpacker way back in the 70s and was charmed in a peculiar way by Afghanistan. Of all the places you could report from, what first drew you to Afghanistan? Exactly what you just said, Rick. I often say as a joke, but as you know, in every good joke, there's a lot of truth that nobody goes to Afghanistan once. There is something about the people, about their sense of self and character, which means that it's very easy to form relationships with them and friendships.

15:14And I have found through my travels, when a people has a strong sense of self, they also have a strong sense of humor because they can laugh at themselves. And for me, humor is the universal language. When I first went, as you said, on Christmas Day, my first visit, not only was I as a person, I was taken in by the strength of the Afghan people, how they were standing up to the Soviet occupation of their country. And of course, as a journalist, I was smack in the middle of history. The Cold War of the time where Kabul was in the crosshairs, a Soviet-backed government battling the Western-backed Mujahideen, it was the Ukraine war of its time, the most grievous war in the world and the biggest migration crisis.

16:02All the eyes of the world were on Afghanistan. And there I found myself as a young journalist and I was totally, totally taken in. Now, you have used as a sort of a way to understand Afghanistan the story of the Intercontinental Hotel and its staff. And you're a foreign correspondent who's been in zones of conflict all over the world. It always seems there's one hotel, which is sort of the oasis, the refuge of the journalists. Tell us a little bit just on a global sense. It just always seems to me there's this one place where you almost huddle together, listening to bombs blowing up in the distance and trying to get Internet access.

16:40Yes, isn't that that strange paradox about journalists that we all love the scoop or the exclusive, but we hunt in packs. As soon as you hear that, well, these were the days where people didn't have phones in their pockets. Do you remember those phones that are plugged into the walls, landlines? And in Afghanistan, all of the, there were three or four, in the whole country, only three or four international telephone lines that you had to book. But most of them went through Moscow. But curiously, one went through the Glasgow Telephone Exchange. So the people who went to that hotel, this modern palace of glass and steel, which had been the first luxury hotel in Kabul, went thinking that at least there was a chance of having a telephone line.

17:23There was food worth eating. and by word of mouth, by reputation, they do tend to surge toward the one place because the worst thing is not being able to get that story out. Yeah. Now, first of all, your book does a great job of teaching through the people you've met and you've already mentioned how it's sort of the wonder of the country. How was it that you were able to feature people in the hotel to tell the story you wanted to tell about Afghanistan through this very troubled last half century? As you know, Rick, in choosing to tell a story, first of all, we have to say what kind of storytelling are we going to do and what kind of prism?

18:03As literature, they would call it a conceit. And I've always been fascinated ever since I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood about how you can use the conventions of a novel to tell a story which is true, where the history literally comes alive and the characters come alive. So in choosing a prism, I needed to have a place where history literally lived in its walls. And this is the story of the Intercontinental Hotel, that it has somehow survived. It has managed to stay standing where waiters keep waiting, cooks keep pots on the boil. The housekeeping staff still snaps those fresh white sheets across the bed.

18:45Never mind that there were times when it was called the worst hotel in the world. And I thought it is a metaphor for a country still standing and in a country where so much has been lost that their deeply ingrained sense of hospitality still remains. And you opened up your book. You started during the middle of the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. And you're describing a chaotic disruption of a hotel wedding party as the Taliban is breaching Kabul. Tell us about that. So if anyone, and I'm sure many of your listeners were following that dramatic, in many ways shocking news that after two decades of international engagement, that Kabul fell and was taken over by the Taliban again, that they were back in power.

19:31But I'm sure that any of the headlines, no one talked about a wedding party that was completely destroyed. No one talked about the anguish of the brides and the grooms. And that's why I was trying to tell a different kind of story. Because in the news business, what do we see? We see snapshots. And if it's a country of troubled lands, what do we see? We see people running away from the bombs. In 2021, it's people running in a panic to the airport. You see people standing in the rubble of their homes. You see them in the darkest, the most difficult moments, moments of enormous emotion and grief.

20:05But what happens in the spaces in between? Life goes on. And I have found in places where death is literally at the door, the only antidote is really to live. And so the weddings go on. So it's trying to bring people in to show the everyday rituals of life that all of us know so well. A wedding in a hotel. And it's not that much difference in Kabul, Afghanistan or Des Moines, Iowa. You know, that's the beautiful thing about it. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're getting a view of Afghanistan through the story of its first luxury hotel. Our guest is the BBC's chief international correspondent, Lise Doucette.

20:43She first checked into that hotel in 1988 to report on the final days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Her new book tells the story of this resilient landmark and the people who kept it open through decades of turbulence and heartbreak. It's called The Finest Hotel in Kabul, a people's history of Afghanistan. You know, Lise, I really like this idea of presenting an intimate side of a story that we read about in the newspapers and see on the TV news by focusing not on the big political actors but the everyday people. And with your connection with this hotel, you knew the staff, the cooks, the housekeepers, the receptionists, and so on.

21:21You wrote so vividly about these people. I don't know if I'm pronouncing the names correctly, but Hazrat, fascinating, the housekeeper, Abida, the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban 25 years ago, and Malali and Sadak. That was a younger staff after 9-11. Can you talk a little bit about a couple of these people and how it can be such an instructive insight into that culture? Rick, what I really admired most about the main drivers of this story is how much pride they still kept in working for the Intercontinental Hotel, even though it was no longer part of the luxury chain. And someone like Hazrat, who's the oldest person in the book, he's now 70-something, but he's still so, so full of pride that he had been trained by the real intercontinental when the global chain ran the hotel.

22:16And every time the hotel changed hands, because every time the rulers changed in Afghanistan, the rules changed at the intercontinental hotel, and he would press upon them that he knew how to run a proper hotel, that they should listen to him. And when I approached him in the hotel and he remembered me from the days when I'd lived there for nearly a year, I said, well, Hazra, I'm thinking of writing a history of the hotel. Would you like to be part of it? And immediately I could see his face just beamed. And then he actually mimicked the gesture of flinging over the shoulder white soft plush towel remembering the wealthy tourists who would glide across the marble floor with the white towel over their shoulder wearing their white shirts and white skirts on their way to the swimming pool and of course that oozed a life of privilege a life of ease and that was not his life it was a completely different world he was the eldest of 10 children in his family His father had died when he was a teenager, when an electric heater fell into the water.

23:20He had to quit high school. But he had such dignity and he had such an amazing memory as well for all of the details as to how it was to work in this hotel. Was it a matter of pride for them to offer world-class hospitality even in their humble corner of the world? Well, when it was a proper intercontinental, 1969 to 1980, when the intercontinental chain pulled out, a friend of mine, Thomas Gautier, who's one of the world's experts on Afghanistan, and he went to Afghanistan as a Peace Corps worker and then he stayed on. He was so excited when I called him up and I said, oh, Tom, what do you think about the intercontinental?

24:01I could hear it all the way down the line from the United States. He said the intercon changed life in Afghanistan. He said, I, for the first time, ate escargot in the intercontinental. He goes, we didn't have aubergine, you know, in the United States. And he still remembered what it was even for an American to be eating at the Intercontinental Hotel. You know, when I was in Kabul, my takeaway, and this was a long time ago, but it just didn't seem to fit Afghanistan very well. And I saw people in, you know, different kinds of uniforms relating to their job, whether they were in the customs or the traffic patrol or whatever.

24:39And it didn't seem like they fit in their uniforms. It seems like they were forced into those uniforms and they would have rather worn their regular tribal robes and so on. It just was a weird misfit to me. Did you get any sense of that? Because I had come from the countryside. Yes, we'll see. And unfortunately, Rick, you were doing a kind of travel. You would not even have gone past the doorman with his red coat and shiny gold buttons on the hill, on the edge of Kabul. They knew they came from a different world, but I never got the sense from... They would still say to me that, you know, Hazret said it was one of the two top hotels in the world in the 1970s.

25:18They still talked about it as the finest hotel because they'd never been in another hotel, certainly not a five-star hotel. But you're right to say it was a rarefied world. It was only for those who had a fortune, for the royals, for the privileged families, for the well-heeled foreigners, for the diplomats. You had to have money, you had to have status in able to go up to that hill. Now, decade on decade, it changed until you actually got some rather unseemly characters when the hotel, when the country was run by the Mujahideen, as they're called, or by the Taliban. Lise Doucette is our guest from London right now on Travel with Rick Steves.

25:54She's the BBC's chief international correspondent. Her new book is The Finest Hotel in Kabul. Lise is known for her extensive reporting from conflict zones around the world. She started reporting from the Ivory Coast in 1983 and from Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1988. Her work has won her an Emmy, a Peabody, the Edward R. Murrow Award, 15 honorary doctorates, as well as an OBE and the Order of Canada. Lise, I was fascinated by your account of Abida, who was the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. What's your take on the reality of women in Afghanistan, and what did you want to share in your book about that?

26:40Oh, Abida. I so love Abida. Here she is. She's in her mid-50s now. She's a single mother. Like many Afghan women, she lost her husband to war and became a widow. So Abeda raised eight children on her own. She's illiterate. She can't read. She can't write except her name. And yet she educated all of her children, six of them, to university level. And wow, could she cook. And that was her pride and joy. She had first worked in the Kabul Hotel in their kitchen. And then when the Mujahideen came to power and then the Taliban, she was forced to stay at home. So when she heard that news in 2001 from the new leader, Hamid Karzai, announcing that Afghan women have rights, you can return to your jobs, she was like a flash out her door.

27:29She raced as fast as she could down to the new government office. And Abed al-Naziri, who could barely write, wrote her name in that legend. She became the first woman to sign up for a job. But today, is it rolled back to the way it was before? Oh, this is one of the saddest of circumstances now. And I'm sure your listeners know about the situation in Afghanistan. Taliban leaders, when they were in the peace talks with the Americans and Afghans, said, oh, we're not going to rule the same way we did in the 90s. We've learned our lessons. Women will have all their rights to be educated. Women will hold down all of the jobs, except maybe they can't be president or judges.